Amazon's 'Echo Show' Can Now Watch Your House For You

There's something new in Amazon's video-enabled Echo Show smart speakers. 'If you have the version with a built-in camera, you can now turn your Show into a security device...' writes Kim Komando. 'Once the monitoring has been set up, you can remotely view the feed from the Alexa app.

CNET reports on Alexa's new 'Home Monitoring' setting, 'found deep within your Amazon Echo Show's device settings.'

It doesn't record video and you can only put it where you'd otherwise put a smart display... But still, it's useful for checking in on things, like kids, pets or your house while you're away... it might just replace that security camera you were thinking of buying. Plus, if you have the latest Echo Show 10, you can not only view the camera feed, but you can pan the room left to right (although, unfortunately, not up and down)...

At first, only the new Echo Show 10 could pull it off, but a recent update seems to have changed all that and now the first-gen Echo Show 5 and Echo Show 8 have a Home Monitoring setting (presumably, so will the updated Show 5 and 8 when the arrive June 9)... Setting up your Amazon Echo Show smart display to appear as a security camera in the Alexa app is a bit trickier than enabling most features — for security reasons, you have to set it up on the device itself, not from within the app.

Their article also notes two caveats: You can't record the video.There's no quick and easy way to set up motion-alert notifications.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.